Posts tagged ‘sci fi’

With the revelations about the NSA’s global listening network, sales of George Orwell’s 1984 have shot up (more than 7,000% on Amazon, jumping from a rank of 13,074 to 193 and still climbing). That prompted me to think about other predictions that science fiction authors have made, and what actually happened…

In 1865 Jules Verne described the first mission to the moon in From the Earth to the Moon. It had a three man capsule called the Columbiad (NASA’s, in 1969, was Columbia) it took off from Florida and splashed down in the Pacific, to be recovered by a US naval vessel.

In 1898 Mark Twain wrote a story From the London Times of 1904 in which there is a world-spanning internet called the ‘telectroscope’ in which the “daily doings of the globe are made visible to everybody”. The protagonist is saved from execution when his ‘victim’ is seen on a live streamed event in China.